Two Days of STEM Fun: Over 100 Middle School Students, Teachers & Parents Visit NIMBioS

NIMBioS hosted two events for middle school students last week that resulted in over 100 students, parents and teachers visiting the institute. On the agenda were fun activities to inspire students to pursue higher education in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). The first event was a field trip by 7th graders from Greenback School in Loudon County, TN, which brought 60 students and three teachers for a day learning about biodiversity and computer image analysis, touring the university library, and building windmills and doing engineering lab tours at CURENT, an engineering center across campus.

Greenback School students took fun photos in the Studio at the University of Tennessee Library during a tour there. Later Eric Carr, NIMBioS High Performance Computing Specialist, ran image altering edge-detection MATLAB code that the students had learned about on the photos.

A number of NIMBioS volunteers contributed to the event by helping out the Education & Outreach staff. Special thanks to Eric Carr, NIMBioS HPC Specialist, for putting together a great activity on image analysis, to volunteer helpers and NIMBioS postdoctoral fellows Amiyaal Ilany, Elizabeth Hobson, Jeremy Beaulieu and NIMBioS graduate assistant Ben Levy.

Participants at SHADES sort plastic insects for an activity on using probability to measure biodiversity.